SHINE, NOT BURN
Just at that point
Jocasta Cameron seemed to know
she might never be happy
with her lover, though she saw
his simple yearning, eager
patience, which might please her
for a time, content to see it all
in her blindness—maybe even
because she was looking
into its clear blackness, into the press
of silence between them: those years
of their intimate
separateness, just at that
precipice, the brief inhale, her readiness
not to burn but shine, just then
I swerve into the breakdown on I-95.
The audiobook keeps on—
Jocasta hesitating while she speaks
as if the words hadn’t been
waiting there already. For a long time
I stare and stare in the rearview:
a wolf crushed by some flatbed
or someone speeding absentmindedly,
too reckless or scared to realize
the wolf is half-alive. Back legs
splintered. Fur white as ice, then red.
The coarse hairs rippling
like switchgrass in the wind
as cars rush by tonight.
What good is death
if it comes too late?
The body shifting into something
shapeless. Slender frame giving. Though
somehow still exquisite in stillness.
Through my window, I hear its small howl.
And then
in the mirror
where everything was
happening in reverse
the snout tilts up,
as though the wolf lifts its eyes
to take in that awful openness
of the black sky. A clear shot
into the heart of the beyond.
